The Measure of Muses

Before I get to the matter at hand, I kind of like this way of titling a blog post. The x of y, where x and y are alliterative. It seems catchy. I don't know if I'll stay with it, but for now it works.

At any rate. On to the matter at hand.

I, as a few of you may know, write both music and prose (nonfiction and fiction alike). The two pursuits have a number of similarities (the emphasis on art disguising the art, the key nature of structure in narrative, &c.) but the one I want to talk about a bit in here is that of the importance--and unimportance--of muse.

I know it's a bit gauche to say so, but frankly, writing (be it music or words) is hard work. We all think of the writer or the composer as someone who comes to their pen or typewriter with everything worked out in entirety, and marks it down on the page, complete and whole. This is pointedly a crock of shit. When you write, you start off with an idea--this is the bit where sometimes you do get something popping into your head whole-cloth. You then write the rest of your work. Right? Well, yes, but that's putting the emphasis on the wrong part of the process.

Getting an idea is easy. We get ideas popping into our heads constantly and we soon after usually forget them. We forget them for a good reason, often. After all, if we were to spend any amount of time thinking the idea through, we would realise that it was stupid, or leads to nowhere. So, the real problem to begin with is getting a good idea. But here's the problem: How do we know what is and is not a good idea? It's not as though they have signs on them. So, what we commonly think of as a muse is more akin to a silent sieve in the back of our minds which occasionally finds a gem of an idea. This unconscious sifter takes the ideas that pop in and out of our head and seems to sort them quietly while you're not paying attention. When it spits something out, it's usually something at least workable, if not perfect.

Here's the problem: Just because it's a good idea doesn't mean it's a perfect idea. And we all want to strive towards perfection in our work; it's simply human nature. So we struggle, and we plan, and we try all the different combinations and methods we know to get this little unformed nugget of beauty and we try to coax it into full bloom. It's important to stress that this is a conscious process most of the time, and is as taxing as any task which requires full and intense concentration. It's very possible (and indeed, can be a boon) to find yourself entirely enthralled to this idea as you try to carve it into shape.

But the purpose of art is to disguise the art, as that old saying goes, and this is why the popular image of an artist of any stroke is that of a genius who sits down and has everything worked out in full and simply transcribes it into their medium. We aren't privy to all of the myriad thoughts that were rejected to come across the gem before us; we aren't adept enough to see the brilliant and subtle structure holding the work together. I know when I was first writing music, some years ago (and you probably were the same when you wrote stories in grade school), I would flit from one idea to the next without rhyme nor reason. I'd find interesting and often quite clever connecting sequences between the two ideas, but I wasn't able to form a unified whole out of them. It was a collage of colours and textures with no sense of being grounded in a single idea; beautiful in its own manic way, but not a work of art.

So where does this leave us? It leaves us with the slightly odd conclusion that it's not mere coincidence that artists almost universally make their work seem easy. It's not easy, but because it is so simply and elegantly constructed, it seems easy.

And so, dear reader, I leave off with a request and a quote. My request is that if you think a favourite work of yours is simple, look harder. If it can speak to your depths, it is almost assuredly not simple. And if you think this sort of academic picking apart of art diminishes it, please trust me: The most worthwhile thing you can do to something you find beautiful is to try to understand it. If we can only understand the ugly things in this life, why is it a life worth living?

My quote is one I found a few years ago, and has stuck with me ever since. It is one of the things that drives me on to never stop searching, never stop dreaming, and never stop learning.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.


T. S. Eliot
Four Quartets: Little Gidding

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Crataegus
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